by Robert Gott
Annie put the Maryborough Chronicle down.
‘I told you it would be a good idea to invite that society matron at the paper.’
‘I spent half an hour talking to her,’ I said, ‘and she didn’t bother to mention me. She promised that she’d put something in about Titus. Maybe I should have worn a taffeta frock.’
‘Maybe you should have felt her up. You know, for the good of the show.’
‘It’s funny. The last thing you say is only the most revolting thing you’ve ever said until the next thing you say. Have you noticed that?’
Adrian Baden came into the dining room where this conversation was taking place. Of all the actors in the company he was the most talented. He was about 25, with the pared body of a distance runner. He was a queer, but he was not the mincing, pantomime type. I knew about his propensities because he had been genuinely taken aback when I had not encouraged his advances. He had assumed that I was a chum. When I asked him why he would think this he had simply shrugged and said that I gave off fairy vibrations.
‘Besides,’ he had said, ‘I asked Annie and she said that you were definitely queer.’
I had assured him I was not, and that I had kept my relationship with Annie deliberately professional in preference to chaotically personal. My failure to sleep with her did not make me queer, although I could see how such an explanation might be a salve to a bruised ego. I’d had no idea that Annie had taken my carefully maintained distance so personally. However I didn’t mind the fact that Adrian was bent. He was reliable and was the only one, apart from me, who could speak the verse. What he did with his body below his vocal chords was entirely his affair.
Adrian sat down at our table. Annie looked at him and said for the thousandth time, ‘All the best men are queer. How are you, darling?’
‘The facilities are adequate,’ he said, ‘and we are very close to a wharf. And where there’s a wharf, after dark there’s a man who wants to be fucked.’
It was at precisely this moment that Augie Kelly came in. If he heard Adrian’s gross remark he chose to ignore it.
‘Last night was a great success,’ he said. ‘If Tibald can get people in here, we can do each other a favour and give the bloody Royal Hotel a run for its money.’
I could see that he had Tour d’Argent delusions. He was wearing a freshly pressed shirt, and his copper hair had been carefully slicked and parted. Overnight he had decided to play the part of the sophisticated hotelier.
‘Your flies are undone,’ I said, and they were. He buttoned them up without blushing and with an unseemly lack of haste. I presume he thought Annie might enjoy watching his fingers fiddle so close to his genitals. He was wasting his time. Annie mostly had good taste in men, and he was definitely not her type.
Over the ensuing weeks, Augie Kelly found a far more compelling reason for keeping us on at a reduced rate than the success of Tibald’s cooking. He fell in love.
The first of Tibald’s dinners had indeed been a success. The candles were a brilliant touch. They softened the decayed and drab appointments in the George’s dining room. The single poppy focussed the eye and distracted it from looking up at the mould that had gathered in the corners of the ceiling. That had been Adrian’s idea. There had been a pleasant buzz in the room, helped by Augie’s providing a halfway decent bottle of Madeira. I spoke briefly to Peter Topaz, but the fact that I felt that he had the upper hand meant that I was awkward and dull, or it seemed that way to me. As soon as he saw Annie he made a bee-line for her, and it was perfectly obvious that she hadn’t the least inclination to repel his advances.
The night of this dinner was the first time I met Polly Drummond. She was there with the soldier boy named Smelt. He had bad skin and a few bristles above his top lip that were trying very hard to approximate a moustache. At one point I saw him place his hand on her knee and move it up to her thigh. She didn’t discourage him, but threw her head back and blew smoke from her cigarette into the air. I assumed they were on intimate terms. At first glance she appeared rather ordinary, almost what the French call jolie-laide — sort of halfway between being pretty and being plain. It depended on how the light fell across her features. She didn’t look more than twenty (I found out later that she was twenty-four), with dark hair cut into a bob. It didn’t really suit her, but I imagine she’d picked the look out of a magazine, and some clumsy Maryborough hairdresser had attempted to make her resemble the picture.
In the days after the dinner I discovered that Polly Drummond smelled of honey and that her mother was barking mad. I also learnt that her younger brother, Alfred, was frighteningly unstable. He had joined the RAAF and was training as a wireless air gunner. I thought asking him to do two things at once was ambitious. There was an older brother but he had headed for the Gulf in ‘39 and hadn’t been heard from since.
My first impression of Polly was that she laughed too easily and too loudly. She was not unaware, if I may indulge in that litotes, of her effect on men. She moved with a casual and sinuous grace that hinted at the sensual possibilities her acquaintance might offer. I was not attracted to her initially. I thought she made rather a fool of herself by asking Annie Hudson for her autograph. Annie, of course, took full advantage of the opportunity, and found a copy of that day’s Chronicle and attached her signature to her advertisement for Tampax. She handed it to Polly with the condescension of a Garbo or a Crawford. She could have signed the Colgate advertisement, but that would have meant explaining that the chap in the last frame, with the back of his head to the camera, was me. Naturally, Polly would have wanted my autograph as well, and Annie wasn’t having any of that. Hogging the limelight was one of Annie’s less endearing qualities. Fortunately, the opportunities to indulge it were infrequent, and we did not come to blows over it.
I saw Polly Drummond late in the afternoon on the day following the dinner. I was sitting in the dining room tinkering with the script. Arthur Rank was with me. He was a shy man who had lost his arm and a testicle in a harvester accident in outback New South Wales. He had been barely sixteen then, and in the intervening twenty years had learned to use his single arm with astonishing dexterity. He could roll a cigarette more rapidly and skilfully than any man I have known. I don’t think many people knew about his other injury.
One night, not long after he had joined the Players, he drank too much rum and told me tearfully what had happened the morning of the accident. He took off his shirt to reveal the ghastly damage done to his flesh. The left-hand side of his torso, from the blunt stump of his amputation to the belt of his trousers, looked as if it had been flayed and the pieces put back willy nilly. The thick hair on his chest grew normally on the right side then stopped abruptly where it met the quilted, discoloured expanse of grafted and ruined skin. Without a word, and with tears streaming down his face, he unbelted his trousers and lowered them to show what else the harvester had taken from him. His thigh was heavily scarred, as was one side of his groin. He lifted his penis, which had escaped injury, to expose fully the place where one half of his scrotum had been torn from his body. We never spoke of it afterwards. He was a lousy actor, but I didn’t care. He was the only one in the company in whom I could confide. I suppose I believed that the badly injured live in a sort of permanent state of grace.
The hotel was quiet. There were a few men in the bar, and I could hear Tibald bashing about in the kitchen as he prepared that night’s meal. Augie was expecting good patronage after the newspaper article. He’d been strutting and preening all morning and trying to engage me in conversation. A couple of RAAF officers had come in earlier and booked tables for themselves and their girlfriends, and there would also be a few walk-ins, no doubt. Arthur noticed Polly first. She was leaning in the doorway.
‘I’m not disturbing you, am I?’
I thought she was doing a bad imitation of some movie star she’d seen at the pictures. She was smoking a
nd striking an attitude that was unnaturally cinematic, as if she was aware of how the curve of her silhouette looked from where we were sitting. She pushed herself away from the door-frame and came over.
‘I think I left my lipstick here last night.’
Her voice was slightly nasal, with vowels hammered flat by the pounding heat of her many Maryborough summers. She took in Arthur’s empty sleeve, and did not flinch or stare or give the faintest acknowledgement that there was anything unusual about him. I liked her for that. In fact, she put out her hand and said, ‘Polly Drummond.’ Arthur stood up, took her hand, and gave his name.
‘Do you sing?’ she asked.
‘Badly.’
‘It’s just that I saw a man in Sorlei’s show who looked just like you and he had a beautiful voice.’
Sorlei’s was a revue company that haunted us. Wherever we went, there they were. They were big and successful, and rural Queensland loved them. They always played the town halls and never to empty houses. They were lowbrow, of course.
‘When were they in town?’ I asked.
‘A few weeks ago. They were terrific. They had this comic who made me laugh so hard I thought I’d pee. Excuse my French. And like I said there was a man who sang and he looked like Arthur, but he juggled too, so …’
‘So it couldn’t have been me,’ said Arthur. Polly’s smile grew into a laugh, and Arthur laughed, too. I had never seen him so at ease with a stranger.
‘I’ve come from work. I work in Manahan’s, over in Adelaide Street. Did you find my lipstick?’
‘Someone would have said if it had turned up,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ She did a good impression of disappointment, but I didn’t believe for a minute that that was why she was here.
‘It’ll be dark soon,’ she said. ‘Could one of you walk me home? It’s not far, just up in Richmond Street.’
‘I’ll walk with you,’ I said.
‘You come, too,’ she said to Arthur.
I felt a twinge of pique when she said this. It took me by surprise, that twinge. Why should I be jealous of the attention this shop girl paid to Arthur? And yet I was.
Outside the hotel the air was warm and felt more like the summer ahead than the winter and autumn behind. It was four o’clock. The factory whistle at Walkers Engineering went off just as we began walking up Wharf Street towards the Bank of New South Wales. By the time we reached the corner of Richmond and Kent Streets we were caught in the extraordinary daily spectacle of the twelve hundred Walkers workers hurtling down Kent Street on their bicycles. There were no cars on the road at all. It was clogged with cyclists. Several of them called to Polly, and she waved at them and laughed. One of them drew away from the pack and skidded to a halt beside us.
‘Tell Fred I’ll see ‘im at the dance next Satdee,’ he said. ‘And tell ‘im to bring the moolah he owes me.’
‘Tell him yourself,’ Polly said.
‘Just tell’im that’s all,’ he said, and rode off. He did not acknowledge our presence.
‘He’s a creep,’ Polly said.
‘Who is he?’ I asked.
‘He’s nobody, and I mean nobody.’
We had to wait several minutes before we could cross Kent Street. It was impossible to do so until the mass of bicycles had cleared. They were like wildebeests on the Serengeti. We walked up Richmond Street until we crossed Queen Street. Not much was said. The meeting with the cyclist had upset Polly and she had fallen quiet.
‘We’re here,’ she said suddenly, and turned in at a gate. I had not expected her to live in a large house, and this was a very large house indeed. A broad staircase rose to a verandah surrounded by wrought-iron railings. In the space between the railings and the roof, rectangles of lattice kept the sun out. The central part of the house rose above the roofed verandah and gave the impression of some grandeur. The front door was carved elaborately, and was balanced on either side by windows that extended almost from floor to ceiling. Like most of the houses in Maryborough it was raised on stilts, but these were obscured by more lattice artfully placed all around the base. There was fretwork wherever a verandah post met the roof. What made the house stand out from its neighbours, though, was the lushness of its garden. The front yard of Polly’s house boasted a stand of tall, thin palms on either side of the front staircase and at each of the corners of the house. Smaller palms and ferns clustered at the bottom of the mature palms. The effect was pleasing, and in summer must have created an illusion of coolness.
‘Nice house,’ said Arthur simply.
‘Too nice for a girl who works in a department store you mean,’ she said.
Arthur was caught off guard. This wasn’t what he had meant. He didn’t think like that. It was what I thought, though, so I was glad he had said it. Polly rescued him from his embarrassment. She smiled at him and said that she was just kidding.
‘My grandfather made a pile out of timber. He built this. He had servants and all. My dad was hopeless and lost all the money. Don’t look too close. You’ll see that it’s falling down. There’s no money to repair anything.’
The front door opened and a woman in her sixties emerged. She was small, and stood at the top of the steps with her hands on her hips.
‘That’s not papists with you, is it?’ she screeched. ‘I won’t have papists in the house!’
Polly didn’t reply. She looked at me and said that the circus was due to arrive tomorrow, and that I should take her to the railway station to watch it come in. Before I had a chance to comprehend this, she said that she would be ready at midday.
She ran up the stairs, past her mother, and into the house.
‘Go on,’ Mrs Drummond screamed at us. ‘Get away from my gate! No papists here! No papists!’
She looked about her as if she were searching for something to throw at us. We headed back to the centre of town.
‘She’s crazy,’ was all Arthur said. ‘Don’t get mixed up with that family.’
I thought he was talking about Polly’s mother, but I wonder now if he wasn’t talking about Polly herself. Somehow I felt mixed up with the Drummonds already. Polly had spoken to me as if we had been going out for some time. It was as if we were picking up from where we had left off. I was pathetically flattered by this, and I should have known better. If I’d said ‘no’ at this point, the hideousness of what happened soon afterwards would not have turned my life from relative order to terrifying chaos.
Chapter Two
in the wrong place
THE SECOND NIGHT OF TIBALD’S COOKING was as smashing as the first, although the entire menu was fish and crustaceans. It was a Friday night — a beefless day. There wasn’t a full house, by any means, but the word would spread and the crowds would come.
The next day I arrived at the Drummond house at midday exactly. I’m a stickler for punctuality, it being the courtesy of kings. I mounted the steps, crossed the verandah, and knocked on the door. It was opened by Mrs Drummond.
‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘We don’t want papists here.’
‘I’m here,’ I said patiently, aware that I was speaking to a mad person, ‘to see your daughter, Polly.’
‘She doesn’t want papists here either.’
‘I assure you, Mrs Drummond, I am not a papist.’
‘Don’t believe you. You look like a papist. You can tell them by their eyes, and you’ve got popish eyes.’
Polly emerged from the gloom behind her mother and spoke sharply to her.
‘Leave off, mum. Go inside.’
Mrs Drummond spat at my feet. The glistening globule of drool landed on the floor. I was taken aback.
‘Popery!’ she snarled, and retreated.
Arthur was right. This was a mistake, but when Polly slipped her arm through mine and I caught the waft of honey that
came from her hair and skin, I rationalised that all I was doing was walking her to the station to see a circus come to town. What harm could flow from that?
We weren’t the only ones who wanted to see the train carrying the circus roll into Maryborough. There were bicycles everywhere, all headed towards the railway station in Lennox Street. We reached it just as the Sole Bros. Circus and Zoo arrived. The place was swarming with children, but there seemed to be an equal number of adults as well. What was the big deal? When we pushed our way onto the platform I saw what the attraction was, or rather I smelled it first. The circus had loaded its motley assortment of wild beasts onto the train. The tigers paced in their cages, and the pungent reek of their urine billowed over the crowd. There were two lions, four camels, a zebra, a black bear, and an elephant that didn’t look happy about its accommodation. Its chains clanked as it strained against its mean, cramped cage. There were several horses that would need to be spruced up before they took to the ring. The journey had been punishing for all the animals. People stared and pointed and squealed with laughter when the elephant drooped its trunk over its barrier and snatched a sandwich from a child who had come too close. The child bawled, terrified, but his mother rapped him on the head with her knuckle, and said it was his own silly fault and that she’d told him not to leave her side.
